Yeah I’m not in any way saying consuming an extra 150 calories per day shouldn’t matter. Your math is correct.
I’m saying that 150 calories as pretty much the max difference in metabolic rates attributable to genetics shouldn’t matter in the ability to lose weight or not gain weight. There are no magic massive differences in metabolism that account for the bird who can’t lose weight or the glutton that never gains.
Wow, THE Lyle McDonald? The self-professed nutrition expert whose qualifications in the field are checks notes… a B.Sc. in kinesiology?
Upthread I posted a meta-analysis from 2018 which found that cannabis users consume an estimated 800 calories more per day yet have lower BMIs than non-users. How do you account for this?
My advice for people looking to be a healthy weight would be to throw away all your food and cooking supplies and only order healthy food online. Maybe unlearn how to cook and and break up with your girlfriend or get divorced and stop being forced to eat food with people all the time. Just sit in your house and eat chicken breast and roasted vegetables because you’re lazy, poor, and hate going outside. Maybe stop being so adventurous and don’t believe that variety is the spice of life and that you’re a foodie who’s gotta try restaurant in town.
The caloric intake data doesn’t seem very strong to me. They reference 4 studies, one of which was short term and one of which wasn’t statistically significant - yet they use the data from both anyway. And I believe in the other two studies the caloric intake was self reported. (One of them was over a period of 15 years so almost certainly had to be self reported.)
Oh the irony.
You don’t need to add unnecessary qualifiers. It’s just two numbers, neither of which can be accurately determined to within even 10% accuracy, that are subtracted from one another. There are no other parts. A surplus is always attributable to overeating because the model is agnostic.
“Eating like a bird” isn’t very precise. I really have no idea what it means in terms of implied calories or even what “a ton of weight” is. Those just sound like things people on reddit would say. The same for “plus or minus 150 calories.” Is that one standard deviation from a mean from a study, or two, or what exactly?
Come on man. It’s 6 studies in the same direction (and the statistically insignificant one was P = 0.07, a hair’s breadth from significance). Even if the calorie excess is half what is reported, it’s way more than you think ought to be possible.
At least some of how these results are achieved is understood, for example The thrifty lipids: Endocannabinoids and the neural control of energy conservation
Mice lacking CB1Rs in the forebrain and sympathetic ganglia are resistant to diet-induced obesity [58]. When exposed to a high-fat diet, these mice display an abnormally low energy efficiency (body weight gain per unit of energy intake) compared to wild-type littermates. This phenotypic change was attributed to an enhanced thermogenic activity in BAT [brown adipose tissue]. Indeed, mice lacking CB1Rs in forebrain and sympathetic ganglia showed increased transcription of BAT genes involved in thermogenesis, including uncoupling protein-1 (UCP-1), improved thermogenic response and O2 consumption following cold exposure, and enhanced uptake of 2-deoxy-2-[18F]-fluoro-D-glucose, as measured by positron emission tomography (PET) [58]. Enhanced sympathetic outflow mediates at least some of these effects. Uptake of the norepinephrine analog PET tracer, 11C-meta-hydroxyephedrine, by BAT was heightened in mutant mice during cold exposure, which is suggestive of an accelerated norepinephrine turnover. An economical interpretation of these results is that endocannabinoid signaling in the forebrain, and possibly sympathetic ganglia, controls energy balance by regulating thermogenesis in BAT.
Exposure of rats to rimonabant, a CB1R antagonist, results in increased oxygen consumption of 18% three hours after exposure. Creating metabolic changes of the magnitude you say is impossible is not only possible, it’s easy.
As I understand how P-Values work, it doesn’t matter how close to 0.05 the value is. If it’s over then the finding is not significant.
And I’m not sure where you are getting 6 studies and perhaps I missed something. But I got 4 from this section:
It could be the caffeine / ephedrine stack from his Rapid Fat Loss Diet®.
It’s just the lower the better. Do you know what a P-value is? P = 0.07 says that there is a 7% probability that the study results occurred by simple chance. 0.05 is an arbitrary cutoff and actually isn’t always the cutoff choice for significance tests. P-values above 0.05 tend to be ignored because the signal to noise ratio on single studies isn’t great even cutting off at 0.05, but a P-value of 0.07 is suggestive of an effect, especially in the context of other studies showing the same effect.
My bad. I had read the section but didn’t reread it after your post - I misinterpreted “4 studies… and the other two”. Point stands.
He has bipolar, so I imagine it’s that. Not really necessary to attack the guy to point out that he is not a research scientist in the field of metabolism, nor does he even have a relevant undergraduate qualification.
In any case it’s pretty stubborn to just chuck out that study on that basis when there’s ample evidence of metabolic changes centered around the endocannabinoid system. It’s not exactly surprising that cannabis use would have metabolic effects.
I’m not sure I’d call it ironic. It’s definitely something.
Sure, I guess, if you understand that the “relative” goes without saying (it’s CICO, not just CI). But if you’re looking at it from the context of a patient going to see a doctor, it’s not a weight loss problem necessarily. In that case, the patient didn’t really have so much a weight loss problem as a brain tumor problem.
You seem to think that CICO means that if someone goes to a doctor, the doctor must automatically assume that they are just eating way too much food.
That’s not what it is. That’s what you’ve decided it should be.
That assumption may be true most of the time, but I’m sure it’s not true every single time. Just because some doctors do make that assumption 100% of the time and miss endocrine tumors, doesn’t mean that “CICO doesn’t work”.
I’m out of my element on this stuff. But isn’t the P-Value chosen based to some extent on the power of the study? So I don’t think arbitrary is a completely accurate way of describing it. In any case, whoever designed the study set the value at 0.05 and it was over. Seem weird to me to include the results in this study.
Does bipolar disorder make you a racist, homophobic asshole? I don’t remember that being part of the diagnostic criteria. Also, was he ever officially diagnosed as BPD by a doctor?
I also find it problematic that the study cited with the highest caloric intake was described as “a short term experimental study rather than a comparison between free-range cannabis users and nonusers” and additionally there is no mention that the study made any findings about the BMI of the cannabis users versus nonusers. (Unlike the other 3 studies where the BMI findings are noted.) So they found cannabis users ate more than nonusers. And…
It’s a meta. Include everything that meets the study criteria otherwise you are just cherry-picking significant results.
0.05 is a completely arbitrary Type I error probability and was chosen by Sir Ronald A. Fisher, a tobacco apologist, eugenicist, and the father of parametric statistics. You can read about him here:
When I took Inference II in grad school, somebody asked the prof why .05 was chosen. His response was, “You could have asked me any number of easier questions, such as ‘What is the meaning of life?’”
As someone who was painfully thin as a young man but who ate far more than his peers without ever putting weight on, and who at the time put this down to a higher metabolic rate, the denial of this comes as a big surprise.
Tardy reply: Yeah, I was simply going for ‘necessary condition’ and I’d be inclined to agree we’re just hair-splitting if not for your analogy satisfying both of our points.
Right, “the rope” is asinine and boorish, yet suicide watch is very real and important. As a failsafe you really don’t want them to have access to the rope! Yet, again, a solution can’t be 24/7 suicide watch; that’d be just a longer way of answering “the rope”.
I suppose I’d say that while we shouldn’t conflate the necessary conditions with the root of the problem, it’s important to not forget the necessary conditions.
I was trying to figure what was even going on in thread because in the way your analogy made both our points, it really seems like nobody here should be arguing. For example, unless I’m missing something that cannabis study doesn’t even relate to CICO.
I’d guess the pivotal problem is that “CICO” sounds like “just eat less” which sounds like fat-shaming. It is a real slippery slope but the opposite of “it’s simple, you’re eating too much” seems like but is very much not “it’s simple, just choose to eat less” and we’re all distinguished ladies and gentlemen and non-binaries here, nobody is trucking with that stupid bullshit.
